have you every though of writing a follow up guide in real book form a guide to identify and a cook book/culinary book along with the identification. it might spark some interest and also keep some of those invasive non-native plants in check
Of course. There are several problems with this suggestion when weighed against this internet forum format.
One: size. As it stands, my articles would occupy something of 275 A4 pages of material (I occasionally use the print PDF function of my internet browser to save external copies of my work and it has steadily grown in size). Of course some better formatting of the photographs by a professional editor could reduce that number significantly, but I'm barely any way along in this project (no prospective end date). Thus, converting it to book format, without significantly reducing the amount of material, will likely end up in a multi-volume work which is not practical for the novice bush foodie. A digital form that can fit on a webpage in any mobile browser (or saved pdf), however, is an extremely portable and useful tool.
Second: this is an ongoing project, which means creating a book now would mean constant revisions and editions as I continue to add material. And to be clear, I currently have approximately 20 unedited bush food articles awaiting publication (and a further 40 or so for the edible weeds, which are a lower priority for me than this project; I was glad to finally knock off my kimchi ones on the weekend - they'd been sitting in my to-do pile for about 2 months). It is simply easier to maintain this page than go through the bother of re-editing editions that are now out-of-date! I can even chronicle my edits in this thread!
Third: accessibility. I'm happy for others to benefit from my work for free. Mark's forum supplies exactly this outlet, both for forum guests and members. Anyone can access the material this way (although I admit my articles are probably heavy on the storage space due to the amount of 1-2mb images they contain! Maybe I need to pay my fair share of website hosting...). This selfsufficientculture forum is the
only place my information exists - I have to download the web pages and store them for my own archive!!
Thus, I hope to honour the founder by directing folks to him, his youtube and his forum, and along the way we can all learn to see this beautiful continent through her eyes and think about ways to change 200 years of European agriculture trying to force this land to grow stuff that often struggles. Our native plants don't struggle; they've been here longer than the colonists. They're drought hardy and grow well in our generally terrible soils.
There's so much good tucker available here that I want those native items to become Australia's unique contribution to world cuisine. It would be a joy to find that, in 50 years time when I am a decrepit old man, "Aussie cuisine" is defined as dishes made with lomandra seed, wattleseed, grevillea nectar, blueberry lily, karkalla, lilly pilly, quandong, geebung, warrigal etc. I want these words to become as common as macadamia, apple, pear, orange, cherry, plum, mandarin. This is a truly self-sufficient future.
